


do not read this very sad

by morefishplease



Series: Comfy Fish Stories [15]
Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: Death, Emotional, F/M, Sad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-09
Updated: 2017-04-09
Packaged: 2018-10-16 16:01:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 960
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10574694
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/morefishplease/pseuds/morefishplease
Summary: A much older Undyne visits her husband's grave.





	

 December 19, 21XX.

Undyne double-checks the date on the calendar, just to make sure. Her eyes aren’t as good as they used to be and she always forgets to wear her glasses; the doctor suggested contact lenses or laser surgery but Undyne turned her nonexistent nose up at both these options; she likes how she looks in her old-lady glasses, half-moon lenses. They go cute with her grey hair and her shawl that she habitually wears, or at least you said they did, and she hung on to that. My husband likes them, she told her doctor, and that was that.

The years have been kind to Undyne. Her face is not so very wrinkled, her back not so very stooped. She doesn’t have to walk with a cane and she even manages to go for a run every now and then, although it really lays her out. Her muscles have thinned from disuse and she gets tired more easily; most days she finds she has to take a nap or she ends up in bed by eight or so.

She spends a lot of her time in the house, reading magazines or watching television. A while ago she started writing poetry but none of it is any good; she doesn’t have a sense for it. The simple rhymes amuse her, though. She keeps a garden during the warmer months, and she’ll put on an old straw hat, one that she got during a South American vacation with you, to keep the sun off her while she gardens. She’s mostly happy.

Outside it is snowing, thick, heavy snowflakes. She gets her coat, hat, scarf, takes the bouquet of flowers from the table, tucks them under her arm, turns the lights off before she leaves. She doesn’t bother to lock the door; she’ll be back soon and she’ll be too cold to want to fumble with the key. There’s nothing worth stealing, anyway. Then she’s out into the bracing air. The sky is pale and grey, the wind sharp and raking. She tucks her chin down, trudges her way along the road. Everybody sensible is staying inside; a few cars pass, kicking up snow as they struggle for purchase. The snowplows haven’t been along yet, but they will be soon.

When she reaches her destination she pushes the castiron gate open, shuts it behind her. She’s gotten very good at it now; the gate sticks and you have to force it almost so much that it feels like it will break, but it won’t. She’s had practice.

Down three rows, over eight. She is very careful with the snow; it’s thick, up to mid-calf, and she doesn’t want to trip, she doesn’t want to ruin the flowers.

When she gets to you she stands there for a long time, staring down at the stone. She reads the words on it over and over again, and soon enough she’s biting her lip trying not to cry. This always happens; she tries not to cry but does anyway. The tears start to flow and she sinks to her knees, puts the flowers down in front of the stone. She reaches out, runs her fingers over it, in the grooved recesses of the letters.

Eventually, as she always does, she takes a deep breath, calms herself, starts to speak. Her voice is still low and rich, if a little more brittle. You would smile if you heard it.

“It’s been five years now. It doesn’t feel like it, it feels like yesterday. I don’t know what I’m doing any more, I don’t see a point to anything. I don’t have any friends or anything to do; I haven’t talked to Alphys in a few years, or Sans, or Papyrus. Whenever I pick up the phone to call one of them I just think about how I’d wish it was you, so I don’t.

“I miss you,” she sobs. “I miss you so much. I know you told me not to be sad, that it’d be okay, but it’s not okay, it was never okay.”

A pause while she catches her breath. Her tears are starting to freeze to her face and she wipes them off quickly.

“Oh fuck,” she says. “I’ve got to get it together. I can’t keep doing this. I can’t go on like this –“

Another pause, longer this time. Undyne looks up at the sky, watches the wind push the clouds past hurriedly, like a teacher herding children past a car crash.

“You humans are so fragile,” she says. “I knew you weren’t going to live as long as me, I was okay with that. I just wanted more. I wanted one more year, I wanted five, I wanted ten. There’s no magic any more. I tried, I got Alphys, I got everyone I could think of but nobody could help.”

A sniff. She wipes her face again.

“I don’t know why I came out here. I just get so lonely some times. I miss you and this is the closest I can get any more. I know I should just move on. I know you wanted me to. But I can’t, no matter how hard I try I can’t. I don’t want to, I don’t want to get over you, I want to be sad about this for the rest of my life.”

Undyne throws her arms around the gravestone, lets the cold marble smother her sobs. If her eyes were open she would see that the wind is slowly dying; that the clouds are slowly parting. One of the snowplows storms by out on the road; a thin ray of feeble sunlight pokes its head from between the clouds.

Undyne kisses the gravestone lightly. “Happy anniversary,” she tells it.

**Author's Note:**

> This story was, I think, what made a lot of people sit up and take notice and say 'whoa, she can really write,' which I think is strange because this story is really not all that good. The problem with it is that it's lazy, it relies on telling the reader 'oh, I'm sad' and expecting the reader to feel sad too; the stronger way of conveying this is to have the character actually act sad, because then you're showing how the character feels rather than just monologuing about it, which is almost always the stronger choice. Not that you should never tell when you're writing, but telling is best used to summarize stuff that's less important and so on.
> 
> People had some pretty strong reactions to this one, which I also couldn't really relate to because it doesn't make me feel particularly sad. I suppose that maybe it's because I'm the writer and so it doesn't affect me the same but it really surprises me that so many people bought into a story that was essentially just saying 'hey, Undyne's sad! feel sad too now!' I've written much sadder (and more effective) fics after this but this one always takes the cake for a lot of people.
> 
> I'll state later that Undyne smells through her gills and, presumably, she either wouldn't produce mucus when she cries, or if she did, it'd come out her gills, which is kind of gross. Even so, I write her as wiping her face after she sniffs. If you're writing characters significantly different from a human, you have to pay super close attention to things like this or it can instantly take the reader out of the story. They'll think 'oh, this person is just writing this character like a human being' and you've lost them.
> 
> One thing that would come back to bite me later that I did in this story was I made it obvious that I was talking about the reader as being Undyne's partner in this. An idea I was kicking around during the wedding story I wrote earlier was that after all of these stories, I'd write the end to it and have it be Alphys and Undyne getting married; in fact, that's why Alphys says she should duck out first during that story, so that she could be there ahead of Undyne, because Alphys being the man in the relationship is cute. I totally didn't think of that during this story and this leads to me locking myself out of something I really wanted to end up doing. Moral of the story: pay very, very close attention to the ramifications of your specific details.


End file.
